Reasons to be cheerful

Phorm is just censorship by another name: delivering content to a user that they didn’t ask for, obscuring what they did request, while not telling them that changes were made. It might start with advertising but could be trivially re-tooled to mask ‘unapproved’ content.

While the IWF and Wikipedia have had some press recently at least they were relatively upfront about the blockages, the reasons for them and the thinking behind it. There is some discussion over what the viewer should be shown if cleanfeed complains (e.g. 404 is lying, but 403 is that the server is refusing which isn’t strictly true either), but at least it’s reasonably public (although there is an argument for hiding the links because by informing someone of the block, you’re confirming that dubious material might really exist there).

But any company (or country) blocking unilaterally a legal protocol are going to find themselves suffering very quickly, as Comcast found out.